Working as a Prison Guard Convinced Me That Bosses Should Never, Ever Date Subordinates

Executive Summary

In prison, the line between guard and inmate is clear — and any sexual or romantic contact is forbidden. In most other workplaces, though, the lines aren’t that clear, and it’s easy for managers to tell themselves they don’t really have that much power over their employees — and convince themselves it might be OK to try to date an employee who seems interested in them. But it is difficult to establish consent between an employee and her boss — or anyone who is above her in the hierarchy. The argument that adults can make their own decisions does not hold water when one considers the importance of a paycheck and that many who report harassment face retaliation from their employers. If your company doesn’t already have a total ban on manager-employee romantic contact, you should implement one.

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My first job out of college did little to prepare me for my future career, but it did teach me something about power — and that all companies should adopt a black-and-white policy when it comes to sexual contact between supervisors and their employees.

At 22, I was lonely, living in a new city, and handling the transition from college to the real world in a reluctant fashion. I had applied for jobs largely at random and soon found myself working in the library of the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility.

As a young man surrounded by female prisoners, I often received flirty attention. Occasionally it was for nefarious reasons, but it mostly came from frustrated women in horrible situations looking for comfort.

Inevitably, I felt flattered by the attention, but that flattery also terrified me. I realized — in large part due to the training I received at the start of the job — that the power dynamic between me and the inmates made consent impossible. Any interaction beyond respectful professionalism was statutory rape.

In prison, the ethics and the tradeoff were apparent. These women were vulnerable and any sexual advances (or receptiveness) on my part would be clear violations of them and of the trust between me and my employer.

In the professional world, the line between bosses and subordinates is not as clear — but it should be. While many managers and employees would probably say the power dynamics of a prison and a workplace are completely different, I have seen enough of both worlds to disagree. Power is power, wherever you are. And lots of HR departments agree: a 2013 SHRM survey found that of the 40% of companies with a policy on workplace romantic relationships, 99% banned supervisors from dating their employees. It’s likely that today even more companies have policies on this; I’m surprised that not every company does. While we have all probably heard a story or two of a successful romantic relationship arising between a boss and a subordinate, these anecdotes should be seen as rare exceptions, rather than the rule. The power dynamic between managers and their direct reports makes “dating” impossible; instead, organizations and managers should view sexual contact between managers and their employees as sexual harassment, and should make that clear through policies and training.

That sexual harassment is a pervasive problem should, at this point, be obvious. The deserved public shaming of predatory, powerful men has brought attention to the issue, but before sexual harassment made daily headlines, a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report found that in 2015, there were almost 30,000 harassment-related discrimination complaints, a number that is certainly well below the number of actual instances of workplace sexual harassment.

The research on how to educate people about sexual harassment, while limited, is equally discouraging. Some studies have found that harassment training does not even improve knowledge about the issue among trainees. In one study of managers, the ability to identify harassment did not improve among those who received training. Another study showed that training seems to have little effect — and may have a negative effect — on men’s attitudes toward sexual harassment. Yet another study showed that employees often interpret sexual harassment policies as threatening — turning the perpetrators of harassment into victims of HR — because a range of behaviors may be perceived as sexual harassment in the eyes of an oversensitive or irrational person.

But there is reason to hope. Recent research has shown more encouraging, but complex, results. It appears that the success of sexual harassment training hinges on workplace culture. One study found that employees were much more likely to internalize training when they thought that their employer would not tolerate harassment. Another study found that employees learned more and were more likely to change their attitudes about harassment during training if they believed their employer was ethical. And in the study of sexual harassment policies, employees were more likely to identify policies as protective, rather than threatening, when the policy included values-based language (such as labeling harassing behavior as “predatory”) and when the policy mandated that bystanders of harassment should try to intervene.

All of this evidence suggests that, to curb harassment, the tone must be set at the top. Unfortunately, harassment is often a trickle-down affair, with those at the top being the greatest violators.

And that’s where prison comes in. There, we had clear rules and effective training that left no doubt as to which relationships were strictly off-limits. In many workplaces, especially those with flatter organizational structures or where bosses are seen as “player-coaches,” the rules may not be as clear. Managers can tell themselves that they don’t have that much power over people. But they are deluding themselves. In any hierarchy, even a relatively flat one, it is difficult to establish consent between an employee and her boss — or anyone who is above her in the hierarchy. The argument that adults can make their own decisions does not hold water when one considers the importance of a paycheck and that many who report harassment face retaliation from their employers. In other words, the system is currently structured such that those on the receiving end are likely to feel as if they have no choice but to give in.

One suggestion that some companies have proposed is to transfer the manager or the employee, but this strategy will likely exacerbate the current culture of harassment. For the employee, a transfer can be interpreted as a punishment since the manager is the one who is obliged to act ethically in this situation. Transferring the manager leaves him in a position of power, even if it is indirect, and an employee will never know with certainty if the rejection of an advance will be conveyed to her new manager, who will still be the pursuer’s direct peer. In addition, neither of these strategies are consistent with the message that the organization is ethical and has a zero-tolerance policy toward harassment.

What supervisors tend to forget is that they are in both a position of power and a position of privilege. If an attraction to an employee is so strong that it cannot be ignored, the supervisor has two options: take a demotion, or quit before he makes his feelings known. If the possibility of a relationship is not worth those grand, romantic gestures, then it is not worth propositioning someone with limited ability to consent.

Drastic measures are needed to reduce the pervasive plague of sexual harassment in the workplace. As the evidence suggests, companies must go beyond boilerplate training by setting a tone that there are clear rules and that breaking those rules is never tolerated. One way to start is to develop an explicit policy that sexual advances by supervisors can never be met with consent and are therefore considered by the company to be harassment — regardless of whether or not the receiver her- or himself sees them as “unwanted.”

Ethan Rouen is an assistant professor in the Accounting and Management unit at Harvard Business School.